the ball drops

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If it feels like you've lost a 12-month street fight, say goodbye to 2012. Good riddance. Lucky number 13 – 2013, that is – looms.

What shall we look for in the coming year? Here's a potpourri of eventualities.

1. Guns – Expect much fuss about gun control, gun regulation and even gun confiscation, disguised as voluntarily turning in weapons, perhaps for cash or maybe even for carbon credits. (These people can be clever.) The bottom line is there will be substantially
more guns in private hands by Dec. 31, 2013, than on Jan. 1. That's because there are few motivations for buying a gun as strong as the government beginning to take them away.

2. Pensions – One of the year's most frequently seen headlines will be “Pension This” or “Pension That,” always about how unsustainable public employee pensions are. They make the fiscal cliff look like a pot hole. Nevertheless, after 12 months of making headlines, those pensions will be largely intact. Public employee unions grudgingly will sacrifice colleagues not yet hired, mostly because they don't want pensions changed one iota for the people who got there first.

Minor concessions won't ward off the inevitable disaster of unsustainable public pensions. The issue will loom even larger and more catastrophic after 12 months.

3. Education – Reform of public schools, whether in Irvine or Washington, D.C., is even less likely than meaningful pension reform or gun confiscation. Why? Because there is no stronger lobby than public school teacher unions. What is at stake here isn't how to make Johnny read better, or read at all, when you get right down to it. What
is at stake is not merely teachers' pensions, but also their salaries, medical benefits, job protection, cost-of-living raises and regular step increases in pay. All will be grasped more tightly than any NRA member's grip on his shotgun. That's why you won't see significant migration of tax dollars from public schools to private ones.

A lot will be made of “reform” for “the children.” But the bottom line is, teachers' pay and benefits will, if anything, grow, come the dawning of 2014. Johnny, meanwhile, will read (or not read) at about the same level.

4. Health care – This one will be so much fun. Just kidding. Radical transformation of health care will bring major legal battles between states and the federal government; between the federal government and private providers; and between patients and the states, federal government and private providers. It's impossible to predict the outcome. But some things are reasonably foreseeable.

Health care will not be more affordable or more accessible, save for a relative few who used to stand in line at the emergency room and now will be allowed to stand in line in front of you to see a doctor on the verge of quitting his practice because of increased regulations, lower compensation and increased patient load.

5. Taxes – They will be abolished. Kidding, again. But wouldn't that be nice? Instead, we will find new taxes at every turn, as governments from city hall to statehouses to the Capitol in D.C. discover they have huge gaps between what they say they must spend, and what they have taken from us so far.

Meaningful tax reform is about as likely as meaningful gun control. You will pay more. You will feel as if you are getting even less in return. The experience will be ubiquitous.

6. Immigration – More politicians will play the race card. More illegal immigrants will wander back to their land of origin because taxes and regulations will further stagnate the economy. Not much else will change, except, perhaps, one thing: There may be more tax-funded benefits granted illegal immigrants.

7. Jobs – There will be a lower percentage of working-age people in the workforce than there is now, and the labor-force participation rate already is the lowest since Jimmy Carter was president, and Jerry Brown first was governor. The government will spin this to its advantage because the unemployment rate won't look like it is worsening, even though it probably will be.

Adding to angst will be a growing disparity between those earning government pensions and the unemployed, underemployed and people who simply have given up hope of ever working again.

8. Environment – Air, water, soil and consumer goods will be cleaner, safer and more user-friendly than ever. Consequently, you will be told on a daily basis that you are destroying the planet's air, water, soil and contributing to evil commercialism by buying stuff you like.

As a result, there will be roughly 13,497 new regulations and laws, give or take a dozen or so, to protect the planet from you, and you from yourself.

9. Infrastructure – Your car, truck or van will need realignment more frequently in 2013 because there will be more crumbling, pot-hole-riddled roadways than in 2012. This will be despite a rash of spending by governments at all levels on things you don't want, don't need and that may never materialize. One of the biggies will be perhaps billions of dollars California will squander on land acquisition, clearing, grading and laying of track for an initial leg of the $68 billion (or $118 billion, whichever estimate you prefer) high-speed rail system.

At year's end, there may be a few miles of track, but with no trains. No politician will divide the sum spent by the miles of track built because it would illustrate how much is being wasted on this boondoggle.

10. Budgets – Despite much credit-taking by too many politicians claiming to have avoided deficits, debts and cliffs, budgets in California and Washington will remain ghastly abominations of overindulgence and of living off credit cards issued in Beijing.

The crisis sound bites you hear today, you will hear again on Dec. 31, 2013.

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